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Yeah, that’s the reason for the domain being disabled for such a long time.
The hosting service for the blog is gently provided by a dear friend of mine however none of us noticed that my subscription for the control panel has expired few days back and this turned the website to the plesk parking page. Anyways we’re back online but let me share a valid experience on enabling domain service through the plesk API.

The main reason behind this is the fact that I needed more space for 2 more Oracle databases on a SLES10 Linux system. The partition mounted on /u01 was initially created as 21GB but I quickly depleted the space with 3 oracle 10g databases that took more than 17GB and the space left was not sufficient for the 2 new databases that I had to create.

Before I advanced with the extension of the VMDK file I connected to each separate instance and performed “shutdown immediate” command as sysdba.
Then I stopped the listener, dbconsole, isqlplus and once I confirmed that no oracle related processes were present on the system I performed a shutdown “shutdown -h now”.

In order to extend an existing hard drive attached to a virtual machine you have to make sure no snapshots of the virtual machine are present. I know that this is quite uncomfortable considering the risky operation that you are about to perform but there is a work around. (The work around is not in this post, so please let me know if you are interested or simply search for it. There is a good chance that I will have an article concerning that topic)

Monitor your RAID Controller at all times!
There is no need to tell you that Monitoring your RAID is of great importance.

Another important thing that I would like to say is that RAID is Not a Backup solution.

So just don’t use it is one or the chances are you will recall these words with bitter regret when you least expect it.
The above sounds like a curse, doesn’t it 🙂
And “when you least expect it” could be an uncomfortable period time for you [no internet, vacation to a deserted destination with no network coverage what so ever, no laptop or mobile device that could allow you to react,… here you can let your imagination lose for a moment and you might get a grasp of all the bad moments to have a RAID problem, or any other problem with your service but this article focuses on the RAID…]

Install the xntpd service and configure it.
You can use the Yast management console to do so.
It is extremely important that both nodes are configured to use ntp server and that they are regularly being updated.
If there is any difference at all within the date of all nodes this could result into inoperable cluster.

1. Copy the cpio.gz file to the first node and unzip the contents of the cpio file

Here is a small list of hardware requirements that we have satisfied by creating our virtual machine as it is:
at least 1 GB of RAM
minimum of 1GB of swap space/tmp directory is said to be minimum 400MB which we have spare in our / mount point

2. package requirements

Since time will be the most important variable for the Oracle RAC it is a must to have all nodes up to date using NTP deamon.
In my case I use a local ntp server and I configure the /etc/ntp.conf to poll that server on boot.
In addition to this I have added a cronjob as root to restart the xntpd service every hour at the twentieth minute, to make sure every node will be generally up to date even If I perform snaphosts and reverts forgetting about the time.

Once you have converted the the first virtual machine that you have installed, you have a mirrored copy of it.
This means that the hostnames of the two machines will be identical and this has to be fixed.

Each Node must have at least 2 network adapters: one for the public and one for the private interconnect. In addition , the interface names associated with the network adapters for each network must be the same on all nodes.

For the public network each adapter must support TCP/IP. For the private network, the interconnect must support UDP for Linux. Gigabit ethernet or an equivalent is recommended.